Extensis, one of the leaders in creating publishing tools and plug-ins, totally floored the MacWorld press conference attendees with a radical new direction for their company. Extensis is going into the online magazine / community business, creating a website designed to be a clearinghouse of information, reviews, and tools for creative professionals at http://www.creativepro.com. Tapping Pamela Pfiffner (late of MacUser and Publish! magazines) as Vice President in charge of content, Extensis was able to erase all doubt that the site would be in any way slanted or biased. Extensis seems to have dual goals, both of them admirable and interesting. On the one hand, Extensis aims to create a central hub through which publishing and graphics professionals can trade resources, job opportunities, tips, updates, and information. In this regard they already have powerful partners with some of the largest names in the industry, including MetaTools, Adobe, MacroMedia, Wacom, and Apple. Their second aim is something of a gamble, but more intriguing: through their own engines and partnering with other companies, creativepro.com will offer "e-services," creating viable and powerful tools available through your browser. One of the most exciting engines, still being built, would allow a search through multiple vendors' stock photography images online to find and purchase the exact image appropriate for a specific project. Another e-service would perform size optimization for GIFs and JPEGs (similar to the online service offered by GIF Wizard.) Extensis will even create an online version of their Preflight Pro software, a tool to check the press readiness of Acrobat documents. Attendees were excited, but the greatest concerns voiced by the crowd dealt with intellectual property rights and the worry that web-based transactions might lead to processed images being found or used by competitors. Extensis was quick to point out the strong and solid privacy policy they have founded. To this reporter, the privacy concerns seemed a touch knee-jerk and somewhat alarmist, considering there is a similar security opening when one emails a project to a remote coworker or to a client. It seems unlikely that even the most unscrupulous publishing agent would spend their days trying to hack into creativepro's servers in order to intercept an image being processed in the hopes it might prove useful to them. Those brief moments of concern aside, Extensis has taken on an immense new project that can prove valuable to any creative content professional. For game publishers, it means a new place to recruit talent for projects or website development. For the game designer, creativepro.com can offer a quick list of updates and upgrades to familiar tools, forums in which to share ideas and approaches to project work, and for the budget-conscious, the possibility to use services on demand. This final element may prove to be the most valuable in the long run. If Extensis allows per-use charging for e-services, it could prove to be extremely economical for the small producer who needs to use a tool only a few times but does not wish to spend the multiple hundreds of dollars to buy a seldom-used application for their desktop. [Jahnel] http://www.extensis.com http://www.creativepro.com